Here's something you don't read about in our history books. The "science" that supported and temporarily legitimized eugenics was established, funded, and spread from our very own United States. Hitler cited the U.S. as a model for an Aryan Germany, our own Supreme Court upheld laws that forced sterilization on people deemed degenerate by local courts, and after Nazi Germany was conquered, their prosecuted leaders cited our own laws in defense of their actions.

What's scary is that some of the families that spread this terrible notion are still in power today, such as the Rockefellers.

San Francisco Chronicle wrote:Eugenics would have been so much bizarre parlor talk had it not been for extensive financing by corporate philanthropies, specifically the Carnegie Institution, the Rockefeller Foundation and the Harriman railroad fortune. They were all in league with some of America's most respected scientists from such prestigious universities as Stanford, Yale, Harvard and Princeton. These academicians espoused race theory and race science, and then faked and twisted data to serve eugenics' racist aims.

Stanford President David Starr Jordan originated the notion of "race and blood" in his 1902 racial epistle "Blood of a Nation," in which the university scholar declared that human qualities and conditions such as talent and poverty were passed through the blood.

In 1904, the Carnegie Institution established a laboratory complex at Cold Spring Harbor on Long Island that stockpiled millions of index cards on ordinary Americans, as researchers carefully plotted the removal of families, bloodlines and whole peoples. From Cold Spring Harbor, eugenics advocates agitated in the legislatures of America, as well as the nation's social service agencies and associations.

The Harriman railroad fortune paid local charities, such as the New York Bureau of Industries and Immigration, to seek out Jewish, Italian and other immigrants in New York and other crowded cities and subject them to deportation, confinement or forced sterilization.

The Rockefeller Foundation helped found the German eugenics program and even funded the program that Josef Mengele worked in before he went to Auschwitz.

Much of the spiritual guidance and political agitation for the American eugenics movement came from California's quasi-autonomous eugenic societies, such as Pasadena's Human Betterment Foundation and the California branch of the American Eugenics Society, which coordinated much of their activity with the Eugenics Research Society in Long Island. These organizations -- which functioned as part of a closely-knit network -- published racist eugenic newsletters and pseudoscientific journals, such as Eugenical News and Eugenics, and propagandized for the Nazis.

...

In its first 25 years of eugenics legislation, California sterilized 9,782 individuals, mostly women. Many were classified as "bad girls," diagnosed as "passionate," "oversexed" or "sexually wayward." At the Sonoma State Home, some women were sterilized because of what was deemed an abnormally large clitoris or labia.

In 1933 alone, at least 1,278 coercive sterilizations were performed, 700 on women. The state's two leading sterilization mills in 1933 were Sonoma State Home with 388 operations and Patton State Hospital with 363 operations. Other sterilization centers included Agnews, Mendocino, Napa, Norwalk, Stockton and Pacific Colony state hospitals.

Even the U.S. Supreme Court endorsed aspects of eugenics. In its infamous 1927 decision, Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote, "It is better for all the world, if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime, or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind . . . Three generations of imbeciles are enough." This decision opened the floodgates for thousands to be coercively sterilized or otherwise persecuted as subhuman. Years later, the Nazis at the Nuremberg trials quoted Holmes' words in their own defense.

Only after eugenics became entrenched in the United States was the campaign transplanted into Germany, in no small measure through the efforts of California eugenicists, who published booklets idealizing sterilization and circulated them to German officials and scientists.

Hitler studied American eugenics laws. He tried to legitimize his anti- Semitism by medicalizing it, and wrapping it in the more palatable pseudoscientific facade of eugenics. Hitler was able to recruit more followers among reasonable Germans by claiming that science was on his side. Hitler's race hatred sprung from his own mind, but the intellectual outlines of the eugenics Hitler adopted in 1924 were made in America.

During the '20s, Carnegie Institution eugenic scientists cultivated deep personal and professional relationships with Germany's fascist eugenicists. In "Mein Kampf," published in 1924, Hitler quoted American eugenic ideology and openly displayed a thorough knowledge of American eugenics. "There is today one state," wrote Hitler, "in which at least weak beginnings toward a better conception (of immigration) are noticeable. Of course, it is not our model German Republic, but the United States."

Hitler proudly told his comrades just how closely he followed the progress of the American eugenics movement. "I have studied with great interest," he told a fellow Nazi, "the laws of several American states concerning prevention of reproduction by people whose progeny would, in all probability, be of no value or be injurious to the racial stock."

Hitler even wrote a fan letter to American eugenics leader Madison Grant, calling his race-based eugenics book, "The Passing of the Great Race," his "bible."

...

In 1934, as Germany's sterilizations were accelerating beyond 5,000 per month, the California eugenics leader C. M. Goethe, upon returning from Germany, ebulliently bragged to a colleague, "You will be interested to know that your work has played a powerful part in shaping the opinions of the group of intellectuals who are behind Hitler in this epoch-making program. Everywhere I sensed that their opinions have been tremendously stimulated by American thought . . . I want you, my dear friend, to carry this thought with you for the rest of your life, that you have really jolted into action a great government of 60 million people."

That same year, 10 years after Virginia passed its sterilization act, Joseph DeJarnette, superintendent of Virginia's Western State Hospital, observed in the Richmond Times-Dispatch, "The Germans are beating us at our own game."

More than just providing the scientific roadmap, America funded Germany's eugenic institutions.

By 1926, Rockefeller had donated some $410,000 -- almost $4 million in today's money -- to hundreds of German researchers. In May 1926, Rockefeller awarded $250,000 toward creation of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Psychiatry. Among the leading psychiatrists at the German Psychiatric Institute was Ernst Rüdin, who became director and eventually an architect of Hitler's systematic medical repression.

Another in the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute's complex of eugenics institutions was the Institute for Brain Research. Since 1915, it had operated out of a single room. Everything changed when Rockefeller money arrived in 1929. A grant of $317,000 allowed the institute to construct a major building and take center stage in German race biology. The institute received additional grants from the Rockefeller Foundation during the next several years.

Last edited by JTWood on Mon Jun 30, 2008 9:13 am, edited 1 time in total.

I am all for the forced sterilization of the American public. Think about it like this - every child is given a vasectomy (or some future safe way to temporarily sterilize men...and a different way for women) when they are born or at a very young age. Then when you are 21 you have to pass a test in order to have the right to breed - including not having diseases/disabilities you can pass on to your child, having a full-time job, not being addicted to coke, graduated from high school, not being a convicted felon etc.

it would end teen pregnancy and cut down on the number of people in poverty. It would also limit the number of children born into hopeless situations like having a 16 year old mother who does heroin. Those children have very little and are given virtually no chance at succeeding in life. Doesn't it always seem like the high school drop outs living in the trailer working at Wendy's are the ones with 7 kids? I know it has a lot to do with getting more welfare money...but this plan would eliminate their ability to do that as a way to sacrifice their children and mooch off the government.

dclark0699 wrote:I am all for the forced sterilization of the American public. Think about it like this - every child is given a vasectomy (or some future safe way to temporarily sterilize men...and a different way for women) when they are born or at a very young age. Then when you are 21 you have to pass a test in order to have the right to breed - including not having diseases/disabilities you can pass on to your child, having a full-time job, not being addicted to coke, graduated from high school, not being a convicted felon etc.

it would end teen pregnancy and cut down on the number of people in poverty. It would also limit the number of children born into hopeless situations like having a 16 year old mother who does heroin. Those children have very little and are given virtually no chance at succeeding in life. Doesn't it always seem like the high school drop outs living in the trailer working at Wendy's are the ones with 7 kids? I know it has a lot to do with getting more welfare money...but this plan would eliminate their ability to do that as a way to sacrifice their children and mooch off the government.

While it is a scientifically proven occurrence that women with less intelligent tend have more kids and begin earlier in life, I must remind you that not all women fit that mold, and also...

Declaration of Independence wrote:We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

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StlSluggers

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Declaration of Independence wrote:We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

Declaration of Independence wrote:We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

..wrote the man who owned slaves.

And it isn't like we don't urinate all over that stuff already.

I see this will go nowhere, so I'll just say that I understand the temptation to believe as you do, but I fervently disagree.

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StlSluggers

Hall of Fame Hero

Posts: 14414

(Past Year: -302)

Joined: 24 May 2004

Home Cafe: Baseball

Location: Parking in the gov't bldg @ 7th and Pine. It's only $3.00 on game day!

Declaration of Independence wrote:We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

..wrote the man who owned slaves.

And it isn't like we don't urinate all over that stuff already.

I see this will go nowhere, so I'll just say that I understand the temptation to believe as you do, but I fervently disagree.

In concept the idea is good scientifically and economically, but it just is lacking ethically.

Declaration of Independence wrote:We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

..wrote the man who owned slaves.

And it isn't like we don't urinate all over that stuff already.

I see this will go nowhere, so I'll just say that I understand the temptation to believe as you do, but I fervently disagree.

Meh, I don't know. There's a huge difference between researching and theory and even developing a technology and actually carrying out a plan for world domination via genocide. But, hey, thats just my opinion.

Last edited by urbanbreez on Fri Jun 27, 2008 2:08 pm, edited 2 times in total.